>>>"During a "Founder's Panel" Tuesday, while no one except AMD committed to a ship date for HSA products (the standard is still not entirely baked), MediaTek's Chien Ping Lu did aver that eventually all its processors would be HSA-compliant."<<<

>>>"So HSA promises real advantages for developers of SoCs and apps -- and for AMD if it can deliver the features in a way that leapfrogs Intel and Nvidia offerings. As with so many issues in electronics, it comes down to a question of when."<<<

WHEN is NOW!

Sony PS4 is being delivered on Friday!

Kaveri desktop systems will be delivered in a couple months.

HSA enabled chips for servers and the cloud will be delivered by mid year 2014.

For some reason the author is implying that nothing much is happening now..

I've been to a lot of dev cons and app developers like to hear about millions of devices they can target today with thier app on a new iPhone or Android phone. Not tens of thousands of notebooks and desktops they can target starting in about six months.

The app developer hears the AMD message this week and says, wake me up in 2015.

Not surprisingly, the PS4 (Fig. 1) is foremost a gaming console but it is a lot like a PC (see Where Has My PC Gone? It's Gone Gaming). It is a rather compact and stylish PC that is powered by a custom SoC (system-on-chip) from AMD that supports AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). HSA is also supported by the new AMD Kaveri Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) designed for PCs (see Unified Heterogeneous Computing Arrives).

HSA incorporates the heterogeneous uniform memory access (hUMA) support as well as hQ (heterogeneous queueing). CPU and GPU share the same virtual memory address space courtesy of hUMA. The hQ support allows threads to initiate GPU tasks directly.

As with existing and future APUs, the CPU and GPU share main memory. In this case it is GDDR5. For the standard APUs, it is DDR3 or DDR4 depending on the chip. The Kaveri is the first non-gaming version that has the HSA support that allows the CPU and GPU to share the virtual memory as well. This simplifies CPU/GPU application integration.

it is difficult to pinpoint where the excitement is because "developer" means so many different things. Yeah, casual mobile app developers couldn't care less about the hardware because it is so diverse and rapidly changing.

RTOS developers have a slightly different view, and gaming devs have yet another. There's just so much variation out there.